Rough Draft

RemoteVote: Increasing Voter Turnout in the United States

Justus Akalonu, Keyion Carter, Progga Chowdhury, Tiffany Finnie

ENGL 21007 Writing For Engineers

Professor: Maryam Alikhani

City College of New York

December 12, 2018

Executive Summary

Voting in federal elections is something that seems so important to citizens of the United States, yet only 54% of Americans who were eligible to vote in the 2016 sized their right. While there are many reasons for low voter turnout, the main one is in the fact that citizens just don’t have the time. As the United States enters into a flawed-democracy status, our right to vote is more important than ever. As a result, we sought to ask the question “How can we ensure that all Americans have the time to vote?” The answer was simple: provide them with the opportunity to vote from their phones using a new app known as RemoteVote. The nonprofit app would allow remote voting from anywhere in the world, at any point during the election day, while simultaneously providing voters with a brief, unbiased description of each candidate. Upon gaining approvals from the government and app stores, as well as obtaining insurance for the app, the RemoteVote is expected to launch just before the 2024 election. The objective of the app is to improve voter turnout to 70% within the first decade of its launch. While limitations involving security breach could exist, security teams will work around the clock with seasoned hackers to ensure the maximum security will be enforced, and election results cannot be altered, offering a safe, democratic future to Americans.

Table of Contents

1.         Abstract . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
2.         Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2
3.         Statement of Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
4.         Objective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
5.         Plan of Action . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4
6.         Management Plan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
7.         Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 12
8.         References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14

Introduction

Did you vote? Do you regularly participate in voting for federal elections? If your answer to either of these questions is ‘No’, ask yourself this: ‘Why not’? The most common response to this final question is ‘I didn’t have time.”

A brief look into the history of voter turnout in the USA, beginning with data supplied by the US Census Bureau (2012), shows that between the years of 1952 and 1968, voter turnout was consistently above 59% of the voting age population. However, the Bureau also supplies the data to show that after 1968, voter turnout in the US has never reached higher than 58%, with 52% average voter turnout appearing since 1972. Looking beyond the percentage of voter turnout and on to the raw data, it is known that in 2016,  the voting age population in the U.S. was composed of approximately 250 million people (Desilver, 2018). Of those 250 million people, only about 139 million actually voted (Desilver, 2018). By calculation, this means nearly 111 million US citizens declined their right to vote in the 2016 election. This number is concerning. This number is larger than the entire population of approximately 184 individual countries (Central Intelligence Agency, 2017).

Fairvote.org (2018) explains that the main reason why voter turnout has decreased is due to citizens not having enough time to get to the polls or figure out the complicated absentee ballot voting. Another major reason for low voter turnout, as stated by Fairvote.org, is that those living in states with less electoral competitiveness feel their voice will not be heard, or is not required, since the electoral college has already guaranteed the outcome of their state’s vote. This is a concerning fact, as it indicates an issue with the democracy status in the United States.

Statement of the Problem

Compared with other countries, 52% voter turnout isn’t among the lowest, only 24 out of 195 countries in the world have a greater voter turnout than the US (Desilver, 2018). On its own, this statistic isn’t alarming. What is of concern, is the fact that as of 2017, the Economist’s democracy index no longer classifies the United States of America as having full-democracy status (The Economist Intelligence Unit, 2017). Due to the electoral college determining the election results, rather than the popular vote, The Economist’s Democracy Index now states that the USA has officially entered into a “flawed-democracy” status. Democracy is something all countries strive, and even fight for, it is something the U.S. once possessed with full status. However, rather than trying to regain full-democracy status, one hundred and eleven million people are still not seizing their right to vote, because they just don’t have the time. Now is the time. Now is the time to be voting. Now is the time to make our voices heard. Now is the time to reclaim democracy.  

Objective

           The goal of this project is to increase voter turnout in the USA to at least 70% within the first decade of implementation. It is anticipated – based on reasons for low voter turnout – that the best way to achieve this objective is to provide US citizens with the opportunity to vote remotely, from wherever they are, using our app: RemoteVote.

Plan of Action

To accomplish our objectives, we designed an app that would not only let users vote directly through the app, but also provide brief and unbiased information on the candidates running. The colors chosen for the app follow a neutral palate, in order to avoid accidental bias of inserting colors that align with political parties. Since RemoteVote in a nonprofit app, it will be also be void of any advertising. This is to ensure that no political advertising will be incorporated into the voting platform – creating a bias amongst voters – as well as to prevent users from unintentionally downloading malware through the app.

1.             Voting in the App

When the RemoteVote app is opened, users are directed to the “Welcome” page, where they are presented with two options. The first option, “I want to vote!” leads to the sign in page, while the alternative option, “Who can I vote for?” leads to a series of commands directed towards offering information on the political candidates running in the election. If a user is opening the app solely to vote, they are asked to provide their full name, SSN, and the password for their account (Figure 1). After the information has been successfully entered, an electronic ballot is presented. This virtual ballot states the position at the top, followed by a list of all those running for it as well as their political parties. When an option is selected, a check appears on the right side of the choice. Essentially, RemoteVote provides identical information as any other paper ballot (Figure 2).

Upon the completion of the voting, the user receives an “I Voted via RemoteVote! Did YOU?” sticker (Figure 3). This concludes the voting portion of the app and is essentially an electronic form of the typical “I Voted” sticker. The voter can choose to save, share, print or exit out of this page. Ultimately, it is beneficial to us when the sticker is shared on social media, one of the biggest platforms for advertisement.

1.           Signing Up to Vote

If the user is not already registered to vote through the app, however, they can create an account by clicking on the button towards the end of the page titled “Don’t have an account? Sign up.” Personal information such as full name, date of birth, SSN, and address will be required to get started. The address provided is used to determine the location of the voter, which will only be used to formulate the ballot they are receiving. If their address changes in the future, the person can simply enter their new address in the settings option provided in the drop-down menu.

The page following the personal information page is the documents verification page which explains to the reader that in order to continue as themselves, they must upload one document to verify US citizenship and an additional document of photo identity. A list of approved documents for both categories will be present if they need to be accessed. Sample documents to verify citizenship include a U.S. passport, U.S birth certificate, Certificate of Naturalization, and Certificate of Citizenship. For photo identity, the user can use their driver’s license, state ID, or even U.S passport, if they have not already provided it for the citizenship verification. These documents can all be uploaded easily using either the app’s scanning or camera software, which both ensure that the document is clear and in good quality.

           Ultimately, the goal of the documents process is to verify that the person is a citizen and at the legal age of 18 to vote. These, however, are not the only two reasons as the photo identity provided is one of the aspects used to differentiate between who is being honest about their identity and who is not. This is accomplished through the next step of the sign-up process, called photo verification. When the user has reached this, they are required to take a live photo of them self which is used in accordance with the photo identity provided before for further verification. Our built-in processing software works similar to Face ID, granting access only if the features on the live photo matches with the photo identity document. This is to increase security and prevent hackers from creating fake accounts or voting for someone else.

The final step of the sign-up process is quite simple, requiring the user to enter their full name, SSN and create a password. This password must be at least eight characters long, with a combination of at least one uppercase and lowercase letter as well as numbers and a special character. These three items will always be required for each log in to vote. User accounts are stored directly into our database for efficiency and security purposes.

III.        Candidate Information Option

A second purpose of creating such an app is to educate those who need guidance when choosing which candidates to vote for. To fulfil this purpose of ours, RemoteVote provides the option of “Who can I vote for?” upon opening the app. In order to make RemoteVote accessible and effective, an account is not needed to receive information on the candidates. Making accounts mandatory may just place us further away from our goal of educating the general public.

When the “Who can I vote for?” selection is made, it leads to another command asking the person if they would like to view the candidates by political parties or positions. Viewing candidates by party may be necessary when one is already registered a certain political party or only wants to vote within a specific party. When a party is selected, the screen is directed to a page which outlines all the candidates running for the party as well as what they are running for. From there, the user can select any of the candidates to view more information on them. On the other hand, viewing by positions may be equally as important during open primaries where one does not have to be registered with a certain political party to vote for its candidates. For example, when a position such as “governor” is chosen, the user is guided to a page of all the candidates running for that position and which political party they arise from. Once again, any of the candidates from the list can be selected to obtain information on them.

Both the view by party and the view by position options, however, result in the same information on the running candidates. This information is also listed in the same format with some of the key details being the name of the candidate, their party, the position they are running for, a brief background, their top priorities if elected, and their past experiences (Figure 4). Links to more information, their website, and even YouTube videos will also be provided as a resource. Ultimately, with the incorporation of both the voting and candidate information function, RemoteVote hopes to educate and make voting more accessible to the general public.  

The effectiveness of RemoteVote will be monitored by recording the number of users who use both functions. We will gather results on the entire voter turnout percentage, starting with the 2024 presidential election. The data will also display if RemoteVote helped increase voter turnout and by how much. From there, an evaluation of whether we met our goal of increasing voter turnout to 70% can be made.  With time and minor improvements to our software, we will utilize our resources to increase that percentage even more.

Management Plan

The main objectives of the management plan for RemoteVote include determination of how long it would take to build and launch the app, as well as how costly starting and maintaining the app would be. For the time frame, consideration was given to how long the app’s developmental process would take to implement. On average, a v1.0 app takes around 4-6 months to develop, and apps with more features usually take a few months longer (Yarmosh, 2016). Since RemoteVote will have multiple versions, in order to keep all the information updated, and has multiple features including optional account registration, learning about candidates in specific areas, and online voting, we presume the process will be much longer than average. Therefore, it is anticipated that RemoteVote’s development will take approximately 2-3 years.

After the app is developed approvals will need to be acquired before launching. Since this app is federal, government approval will be required, which is anticipated to be received within a year (Troutman, 2018). After federal approval is granted, approvals from the App Store and Google Play Store will also be required, allowing RemoteVote be used on both Androids and iPhones. According to as Halim Otzurk (2016), Google Play Store approval takes approximately 2-4 hours. Additionally, App Store approval takes approximately 24 hours (Edmonds, 2017).

In addition to approval grants from the government and app stores, insurance is necessary before RemoteVote can be launched. The two main types of insurance we’ll need are General Liability Insurance and Cyber Liability Insurance. General Liability Insurance covers property damage, physical injuries and copyright infringement, as stated by Insureon (2018). Cyber liability insurance covers things like data loss and theft (Thune, 2018). After completing the necessary paperwork, we won’t have to wait for approval like with the government, so in terms of time the insurance process will be very short. Therefore, the entire process of developing the app, getting approvals, and getting insurance will take us approximately 3-5 years.

In this time frame we will also be marketing the app, so voters are already aware of it before it’s launched, and then they’ll immediately get on it as soon as it’s available. We will promote RemoteVote mainly by using various social media advertisements, and pamphlets. Our goal is to have the app up and running by the 2024 elections, specifically the Presidential. Since the Presidential election is the most important one in our country, we want voter turnout to increase the most in that one, through the use of RemoteVote.

As for the expenses, we estimate the app’s development to cost approximately $150,000. Yarmosh explained that simple apps for one platform may cost as low as $25,000 while the most complex apps for multiple apps may cost 1 million plus (2015). Considering this information, since RemoteVote is quite simple, because it is mainly just for voting and learning about candidates, and it is for multiple platforms being iPhone and Android, we believe $150,000 would be the most logical price for development. The app itself will be free on the App Store and Google Play Store. This is to ensure all voters can have access to the app, even those who are financially struggling.  

The rest of our expenses are made of insurance costs and staff salaries, which we expect to be around $100,000 to start, but may increase or decrease over time. General Liability Insurance costs about $425 per year, which will be continuous (Insureon, 2018). Cyber Liability Insurance costs between $1,000 and $7,500 annually, which will also be continuous(Thune, 2018).  For the staff salaries, it depends on how much each position charges per hour, how many hours they work, and how long they plan to work with us. For example, one of our staff members will be a Developer Operations Specialist. According to PayScale, they make about $49 per hour. Let us say our Dev-Ops Specialist works 5 hours a week, every week of the year, and for 3 years. Their weekly salary would be 49 times 5 which is $245. That multiplied by 52 weeks in a year would give him an annual salary of $12,740. So, if he works with us for 3 years his total salary would be $38,220. These are the calculations we would make for each staff member we hire. Therefore, our total price for everything at the start will be approximately $250,000.

In terms of staff members, we’d have two  teams – a part-time team and a full-time team. The part-time employees we’d hire are the Dev-Ops Specialist, Designer, Quality Assurance Specialist and the Tech Project Manager (Semeney, 2018). As the name suggests, the Developer Operations Specialist is the main developer of the app. For this app, he/she would be the one who does the majority of the coding and scripting on candidate information (Earnshaw, 2013).

The Designer is the one responsible for designing graphics, so in this app he/she would provide the pictures of political party symbols and candidates. This person would also add the colors to make the app visually appealing overall, while maintaining the neutral color scheme. The Quality Assurance Specialist is basically a tester during the developmental process, who tries to identify problems for the Dev-Ops Specialist to fix (PayScale, 2018). Last in the part-time team, is the Tech Project manager, who also, as the name suggests,  manages or oversees the app’s development.

For the full-time team, we’d hire a Mobile Developer, Backend Developer, security staff, legal staff, and a Marketing Expert (Semeney). The Mobile and Backend Developers are also key programmers of the app. Since they work full-time, they’ll be responsible for updating information by tweaking or removing codes and scripts. For example, if a candidate were to drop out of an election, they would be the ones to go into the system and remove their information, and display a message telling voters about that candidate’s withdrawal. The security staff would consist of multiple programmers who specialize in hacking prevention. Since personal information is included when making an account, hacking will always be a security issue, so we’ll need these staff members for that reason. The legal team will consists of lawyers who will mainly handle the paperwork. They’ll handle the paperwork for approvals, insurance, other staff members’ contacts, as well as contracts from companies who may want to sponsor us in the future. Finally, we have the marketing expert who will continuously promote the app, through the pamphlets social media ads. Hence, these are all the staff members we’d need to make RemoteVote a successful app, and ultimately reach our goal of increasing voter turnout to 95% in our country.

Conclusion                     

Anything regarding technology raises the question of security and since our app will run on major processing platforms, there is no doubt that hacking is one of our biggest limitation. In fact, when a similar online voting system was experimented with in the District of Columbia on 2010, the public was invited to hack it. To their surprise, it only took about 36 hours for a University of Michigan professor, Alex Halderman and his students to hack the system and elect a cartoon character (Sara, 2012). To avoid situations as such, we will challenge a group of trained, professional hackers to constantly find vulnerabilities in our app’s security system. If any threats or hackers are detected, the system will be shut down temporarily to prevent further damage. The hacking specialists will then work with our security team and us, the creators of the app to not only reach a solution, but also ensure that something like this does not happen again in the future. Another way we hope to resolve security issues is by a secure login process where voters are mandated to register for an account. This account will be stored into our database for security reasons but for each log-in, the name, SSN, and unique password will be required.

Another common limitation of ours is duplicate voting. This pertains to voting on the app more than once, as well as voting once on the app and once again at the polls. Our foremost solution is to link our app electronically with the polling stations. With electronic transfer, the data can be easily sent from our app to the polls and vice versa. This would clearly show both our app and the stations which individuals have already placed a vote. This would require the polling stations to adopt computers or tablet devices to keep track of the voting, instead of the standard paper sign-in. An alternative resolution to duplicate voting would be to open an early voting period on the app where everyone voting through the app has to vote a few days prior to the actual election date. This however, is our last option if electronic linking fails as it can create confusion and hinder the completion of our goal.   

Laziness and difficulty of reaching polling stations as well as ignorance among the general public on voting has led to a significantly low voter turnout in the United States. Many hold a stronger fear of their voices will be overpowered by the electoral college, especially after the 2016 presidential election. The democracy that is claimed so highly of this country is slowly fading through the lack of general initiative. RemoteVote aims to diminish these concerns over time by providing mobile voting through the app, from wherever they are. The app’s electronic ballot makes it efficient for students, full time workers, and those who are not at home, to vote from anywhere within the United States. Within a century of launching, in 2124, we anticipate that voter turnout in the United States will increase to 95%, with at least 75% of the voters using the app. Let’s make time for those who need it. It is time to sway away from this “flawed democracy” and give those 111 million people a voice of their own.

References

Central Intelligence Agency (2017). Country comparison: population. Retrieved from https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2119rank.html

Ctrl Alt Elite, Inc. (2018). RemoteVote. Retrieved from https://marvelapp.com/554aaj8/screen/51106674

Desilver, D. (2018). U.S. trails most developed countries in voter turnout.Retrieved from http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/05/21/u-s-voter-turnout-trails-most-developed-countries/

Earnshaw, A.(2013). What is a dev ops engineer?Retrieved from https://puppet.com/blog/what-a-devops-engineer

The Economist Intelligence Unit (2017). Democracy index 2017: free speech under attack [PDF]. Retrieved from http://pages.eiu.com/rs/753-RIQ-438/images/Democracy_Index_2017.pdf?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWkRKbU1HWmxNVEUwTW1FdyIsInQiOiJPdlltVFV0blFRQzZNVERCZHhVeitZRElmUGplOHh3NWs1d2wzVzdRS1JvNU1kVmUxQVRESU9LbEVSOVwvR1F4aG1PV1NlS0ZZcng4NzBcLzVNZ09JOUxiZU5TTEVPekVHayttOTRqQkQ5TkNzWGN08RlowQTZ0UzlUK0pDdm9PVGlcLyJ9

Edmonds, S. (2017). What is Apple’s app store approval process & how long does it take?Retrieved from https://roundhouse.cc/us/what-is-apples-app-store-approval-process-how-long-does-it-take

Fairvote.org (2018). Voter turnout: what affects voter turnout?Retrieved from https://www.fairvote.org/voter_turnout#voter_turnout_101

Insureon (2018). How much is business insurancefor software and application developers?

Retrieved from https://it.insureon.com/resources/cost/software-app-developer

Otzurk, H. (30 Jul 2016). How long does it typically take to publish an app on the Google Play Store? Retrieved

 

Final Draft

Writing for Engineers – Proposal Click this link to view as a Word Document